This time, history will be written by the victims

Dangerous Nationalism

Nationalism mixed with resentment and racism: pictured are Armenian women hung from the center square of Constantinople by local janissaries, while a large crowd looks on. This was in 1915, a week before the Armenian Genocide happened: at this point the Ottoman Empire was in a chaotic state. Recently purged from Europe by the Balkan League, the empire faced great hardships from an economic crisis due to the millions of Turkish refugees of the Balkans into Anatolia, cease of trading with the allied powers (England, France, and Russia) and the great Arab Revolt, with British help. The Triumvirate of the Pashas (Talaat, Enver, and Djamal) needed a scapegoat to help fuel resentment into justifying the entry of WWI, in which the empire tried to regain its European territories. The scapegoats were it’s Christians minorities in Asia Minor, the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians it still had authority over. These ethnic groups located in Anatolia didn’t have the means to wage an uprising like other former countries within the Ottoman Empire did, they primarily wanted to live in peace in their homelands of Constantinople, Adrianople, Cappadocia, Van, Diyarbakir, Erzurum, Trabzon, Nicomedia, etc. but these groups would be the perfect scapegoat for the Pashas to justify a ‘Holy War’ as they called their entry into WWI, particularly since The Russian Empire, which was Orthodox like the Anatolian christian minorities, were at the back door. The triumvirate would pass the Techir Law, which would justify the relocation's, which were truly death sentences and commands to purge the empire of all ‘undesirables’ such as the Armenian women picture.